With solid state drives getting cheaper, I thought I might dip my toe in the water and purchase a 120GB drive to play around with. The purpose of this thread is to house my musings about this project, and to get some feedback from other users.

To date I have installed the 120GB SSD drive as the C: drive and left my previous drive as the D: drive to house the data.

With my previous setup I had a single Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive housing the OS and all my media. This has served me well, but the Caviar Black drives are quite noisy and run quite hot. The other thing that has me worried is that I hate the thought of all my media being on a single drive. A drive failure would be devastating as it has taken ages to put my collection together.

My goal is to have only the SSD in my HTPC with the OS, MediaPortal Application and database, and TV buffer. My media I’d like to move off to a NAS with RAID-5 (something like AllenG has done) and house somewhere other than the lounge as this would be quite noisy. The advantages that I see is that my media has redundancy due to RAID, and that I am removing noise and heat from my HTPC.

A disadvantage might be performance. As yet this has not been tested, but I’d like to know what the setup would perform like if I am say recording 2 channels in HD, say channel 1 and 3, while watching a third? Could the 1.0GB Ethernet keep with the data stream?

You mentioned you would run both mediaportal, the tv server and tv buffer on the htpc, therefore the ethernet speed is irrelevant if recording 2x channels on the htpc while watching a 3rd, unless u mean that you are setting the recording directory in the media server in which case I think the band width would be fine.

HTPC has a 64GB SSD for OS, applications and timeshift buffer and a 500GB WD Black for recording (this only spins up for recording and playback so doesnt add a lot of heat or noise).

All of my other media is housed on a server in the basement (2 x 2TB mirrors using WD black editions). I went with mirrored as onboard RAID sucks with RAID 5, especially if you try and set up 3 2TB drives :-)

I have video streamed to the HTPC and music via a Logitec Squeezebox Touch.

When you live your life on Twitter and Facebook, and are only friends with like minded people on Twitter and Facebook, you are not living in the real world. You are living in a narcissistic echo chamber.

My thoughts are my own and are in no way representative of my employer.

"...and house somewhere other than the lounge as this would be quite noisy."

My system has two Seagate 2TB green drives in it, and there's hardly any noise. The fan from my older Sony LCD 40inch TV makes more noise than the PC. These days you can make a pretty silent (and cheap) PC without resorting to moving it to the basement.

Twitter & Pushbullet »

Follow us to receive Twitter updates when new discussions are posted in our forums: